Right when I tuned in, they were in the middle of one of these lapses. And when I had finished formulating my stringent and resentful critique (as if I really cared), they were still going full speed ahead. It was impossible to know where they were going: the swaying of the camera was frenetic, and the few blurry images that abruptly broke through the darkness didn’t give me any clues. The noise of the scooter’s engine, pushed to the max, drowned out the voice of María Rosa, who talked nonstop, made jokes, laughed, and seemed very excited. I tolerated it for a few more minutes, and when they still hadn’t arrived anywhere, I changed channels. I surfed through all seventy channels, and when I returned, after what seemed like a very long time, they were still riding the scooter. This was the last straw.
Where were they going? Might they have finally convinced themselves that they couldn’t squeeze anything out of nighttime in Pringles, and they had decided to explore a neighboring town, like Suárez or Laprida? Suárez was the closest, but still it would take them an hour and a half to get there, and they couldn’t be that unreasonable; moreover, the road there would have been smoother; judging from the bumps and jolts, they were driving on dirt roads, around curves, and in one or another of those vertiginous diagonal screenshots, the light on the camera hit on some trees and, every once in a while, a house. They must have been on the outskirts of town, or maybe they’d gotten lost. Maybe a nightclub had opened up out there, or in the neighborhood around the train station, which was some distance away. It seemed unlikely. There was a truck stop next to the roundabout on Route 5, the famous La Tacuarita, where the gourmets of Pringles used to go, but the highway went there, and they clearly were not on the highway.
Then I thought of another explanation, which was much more likely: there had been an accident, María Rosa had heard about it, and they were rushing there, turning their backs on the frivolity of nightlife in favor of real news. Saturday nights were the most prone to automobile accidents: half of Pringles had lost their lives or been crippled in accidents. The strange thing now was that I didn’t hear any sirens. But that was the best explanation for why the reporter was driving so far. She must have wanted to get there to take pictures of the dead bodies and talk to the witnesses or a survivor.
All my suppositions turned out to be wrong, except one: the nocturnal camera really was going in pursuit of a startling news item that it had heard about while making the rounds of the nightclubs. Though it was neither a traffic accident nor a fire nor a crime, but something much stranger, so strange that nobody in their right mind could believe that it was really happening. So they were going (they couldn’t not go) to expose the lie and unmask the pranksters. The prank might have been the phone call, or the information that had made them go, and if so, they wouldn’t find anything.
Anyway. They were on their way to the Cemetery because they’d been told that the dead were rising from their graves of their own accord. This was as improbable as an adolescent fantasy. It was, however, true. The guard who sounded the alarm first heard some rustling sounds that kept getting louder and spreading across the graveyard. He came out of the lodge to take a look and hadn’t even made it across the tiled courtyard to where the first lane of cypresses ended when, in addition to the worrisome rustlings, he began to hear the loud banging of stone and metal, which seconds later spread and combined into a deafening roar that reverberated near and far, from the first wing of the wall of niches to the rows of graves extending for more than a mile. He thought of an earthquake, something never before seen on the serene plains of Pringles. But he had to dismiss this idea because the paving under his feet could not have been more still. Then he managed to see, by the light of the moon, what was making the noise. The marble gravestones were moving, rising from one side and breaking as they came hurtling down. Inside the crypts, coffins and iron fittings were spliting open, and the doors themselves were being shaken from inside, the padlocks were bursting open, and the windows were shattering. The covers of the niches were being forced off and were crashing loudly to the ground. Concrete crosses and stucco angels flew through the air, hurled from the crypts as they violently flung open.
The thunderous roar of this demolition had still not ceased when there rose from the wreckage — one could say from the earth itself — a chorus of sighs and groans that had an electronic rather than a human timbre. That’s when the guard saw the first dead walking out of the nearest vaults. And it wasn’t two or three or even ten or twenty: it was all of them. They appeared out of tombs, crypts, vaults; they literally rose out of the ground, an invasion, legions of them, coming from every direction. Their first steps were shaky. They looked like they were about to fall but then straightened up and took one step, then another, waving their arms about, moving their legs awkwardly and stiffly, as if they were marching in place, lifting their knees up too high, then letting their feet fall any which way, as if even the laws of gravity were new to them. But they were all walking, and there were so many of them that when they reached the pathways, they crashed into one another, their arms and legs got tangled up, and for moments they formed compact groups that shook in unison and separated with violent stumbles.
This lack of coordination was understandable after awakening from a long immobilized sleep, especially since each sleep had lasted a different length of time. They all looked too tall, as if they’d grown while dead, which surely contributed to their clumsiness. No two were the same, except in how horrible they were, in the conventional way corpses are horrible: shards of greenish skin, bearded skulls, remnants of eyes shining in bony sockets, sullied shrouds. And groans, both hoarse and shrill, every time they breathed.
The first victim was the guard. This civil servant with long years of experience had never seen anything like this, but he didn’t just stand there watching the show. Once he realized what was going on, he made an about-face and took off running. Looking back, he saw the dense crowd of corpses with creaking bones and cartilage pressing down the side corridors of the walls of niches, while others were still climbing down from the top-most niches like “the spider dead,” otherworldly greyhounds oozing slime. There, the rooftops shaded the moon, but a silvery phosphorescence emanating from the bones lit up the scene, making the tiniest details sharp, all in ghostly black and white. The guard didn’t hang around to observe the details. He ran across the atrium, and when he reached the fence railings, he remembered that a few hours earlier he himself had wrapped the thick chains around the heavy gates and closed the padlock. Damn security! The keys were hanging on the wall of his office, so he took off in that direction after deciding against the facing door, which was the entrance to the chapel (even though he was already placing himself at the mercy of all the saints). Luckily, the office had metal doors, and luckily he arrived there before the corpses, who were already marching through the atrium. He got a jump on them thanks to how slowly they were going, that there were so many of them, and that in their hurry they were getting in each others’ way. How many dead were there in the Cemetery? Thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Nobody had ever bothered to count up the entries in the register, those handwritten manuscripts that had sat for a hundred years in the archives. And they were all moving en masse toward the door, without any coordination, like water flowing toward the drain.